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I received an email from a random site telling me that someone had initiated a password change request for an account of me. I'm not the most brilliant person ever and tend to recycle passwords between different. Due to having received this email, I elected to update my Google Account password to something I had never used before (yay security!)

When I went to change my account password, I was prompted by Chrome to allow it to generate a secure password for me. As I have Chrome connected to my Google Account, I was prompted that, by allowing Chrome to auto-generate a password, this password would be saved to Google Smart Lock, and, I assumed, synchronized to my Google Nexus, which is also synchronized to my account.

So I allowed Chrome to generate a new password for me. All was well and good.

Later on, when I was away from my computer, I pulled out my phone, and discovered that I had been logged out my of my Google Play account. No big deal, I thought to myself, I just need to re-authenticate. So I went to the login screen and selected my email from the list of saved passwords that I was provided by Smart Lock.

It was at this moment that I realized that Smart Lock HAD NOT saved my new password. Brilliant. So I attempted to recover my password.

Then I ran into my second hurdle. I was informed that Google would send an email to the account I had on file for account recovery, which was an email that I had not used since I first began using GMail/Google products, some twelve years ago. For some reason entirely beyond me, even though I have my cell-phone number added to my Google Account, and I use the Authenticator App, there was no option to simply send me a text message with a code for account recovery. It was very adamant that I must use this decades forgotten email address for recovery.

So half an hour passes and I finally manage to get logged into this email, and I get everything verified and I change my password AGAIN to something that I actually know what it is. All is well and good, until I look to make sure that Smart Lock has updated my password. It still has not.

My next attempted action also proved fruitless. I had the (what I had at the time assumed to be) brilliant idea to go in to Chrome's password manager, find the password entry, and simply change it there, since Chrome itself was refusing to acknowledge the password update. But alas, my attempts were foiled! Because Chrome does not have an option to allow manual entry or manipulation of password data! Why is this? I have no idea! Perhaps I'm being protected from myself.

So i was still left with the rather troubling prospect that; Google Chrome is simply refusing to save a password for GMail, of all things. I double and triple checked that Chrome was set to prompt me to save new passwords and that mail.google.com was not added to the Never Ask list. I had four other gmail accounts with saved passwords which I would be prompted to use whenever I attempted to log in, and yet I could never get it to save my new password.

Finally, after an hour of Googling, I came across one help article which solved my issue and allowed Chrome to save my new GMail Password. The steps were as follows:

1) Disable Account Synchronization in Chrome. Entirely. Completely sign out of the browser.
2) Delete every entry for the affected web site from the password manager.
3) Log out of the website.
4) Log back into the website.

And only then, was I FINALLY graced with the god-like "Would you like Google to save this password?" dialog box.

This is completely unacceptable.

I should not have to jump through so many hoops in order to accomplish a task as simple as updating my account password.

I should not have to delete my passwords from password manager in order to have it function.

I do not understand why I could not authenticate myself with my mobile phone number.

And I do not understand why I am not allowed to edit my own password information stored in my browser. This is not rocket science, this should be basic functionality of any decent password manager. I do not need to be protected from myself. If I could have simply manually added a password in, I would not have had to go through all of this additional trouble and frustration.

Please, please, do something about this. Any of it. Just something to make the process of changing a password and having that password change propagate across devices even SLIGHTLY less painful.

Sincerely,
A Very Disgruntled User